Test Environment for a version of the live site?

You can test some changes by saving (but not publishing) them, then using "SIte Preview" in the bottom-right of the Blox admin panel.

It's not perfect, but it works to verify most changes.

We asked TN this years ago and were told, essentially, no. You'd have to pay for a second site for that. Maybe their policy has changed since then?

I should add we get around this by keeping a URL directory on our site that's strictly used for testing purposes. It's a name that the public generally wouldn't type in, so it won't get seen by too many people. It's not a perfect solution since it's still technically live on the Web, but it works for our needs.

I've long wished that Town News would maintain a "live demo" site that customers could log into and play around. It could automatically wipe/reset every week or month or something, but would provide a playground to really push the limits with no fear of breaking something on a production site.

You can go into settings urls and duplicate your url map ... in design/blox the duplicate url map shows up below the default one. You can then edit pages in the duplicate and use the preview function to view them....

(note the preview will show your live url map it will look like ".../main/preview/site/" append the new map name to end like so "/main/preview/site/newmap/-/"

To the best of my knowledge you can't copy a page from one url map to another... so if you have to either make the duplicate the live url map or you after you finalized a page design you would have to make those changes to the live page if you didn't want to change the whole url map.

Hopefully Christine Masters will jump in here and correct me and we'll find out about a whole set of options I wasn't aware of.

This is correct... for trying out blocks and playing with page customization options (especially in Flex), having a test URL or a test URL map would be the way to go.

To play with templates, you'd have to create copies and then set them up on a test URL.

One thing to note, however, is that in Flex we've provided many more easy options in the page customization panel, and when you save those, it is LIVE. It was added as a group ACL, so if you want, you can ask that those capabilities are removed from some members of your organization (if you're worried about them changing stuff without approval). However, we do have a feature on our roadmap to allow previews of page customizations and layouts, before you "publish" the changes live.

Hopefully this helps a little! =)